


That Never Plighted Troth

by yunitsa



Category: The Bedlam Stacks - Natasha Pulley
Genre: M/M, Peruvian statues make them not do it, Post-Canon, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-10
Updated: 2017-12-10
Packaged: 2019-02-12 18:30:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12965742
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yunitsa/pseuds/yunitsa
Summary: Descend, and touch, and enter.





	That Never Plighted Troth

**Author's Note:**

  * For [novembersmith](https://archiveofourown.org/users/novembersmith/gifts).



> The title and epigraph are from Tennyson's "In Memoriam A.H.H." (1849).

_O, therefore from thy sightless range_  
_With gods in unconjectured bliss,_  
_O, from the distance of the abyss_  
_Of tenfold-complicated change,_

 _Descend, and touch, and enter; hear_  
_The wish too strong for words to name;_  
_That in this blindness of the frame_  
_My Ghost may feel that thine is near._

 

We could do nothing quickly, which suited me well enough – despite having grown used it, the altitude still left me feeling somewhat attenuated, and made it easier to become accustomed to the rhythms of a marqayuk. I drank my coffee and we sat and talked, and did that without any hurry too; I told him something of what had happened in the meantime, of the plantation and Minna and Cecily and Harry’s will. It was a little strange, that he did not know: I had felt somehow, all this time, that he had been with me, in my thoughts and in the pull of the rosary against my wrist. I had seen him notice that, in the same careful way he noticed everything about me.

The guards were still behind us, silent and watchful, but it was getting easier to ignore them, like servants in a London club. I finished my coffee, and his too when he offered, for of course he no longer needed it. It was cold out on the balcony, the clean scouring cold of the heights, and when Raphael shifted beside me in welcome I moved closer to him. He wasn’t warm, but his bulk shielded me from the wind. After a while his arm curved around my waist, loosely, so I could stand up from it as from a sopha. Somehow he arranged himself so that the position would not be a strain on my back, just as he had always done, though it could not now have been easy. I leaned against him more heavily, as though a cable inside my spine had snapped; it was like finding that what one thought was a bottomless precipice had steps cut into it at just the right height. I could have wept with the sudden joy of it, after twenty years of loneliness.

‘I didn’t think you would come back,’ Raphael said eventually. His voice was lower, a steady vibration that I could feel in my bones.

‘I know you didn’t.’

‘I wouldn’t have blamed you. Half a lifetime.’

‘I know.’ It was hopeless to explain: I had to trust that my being here would do for a declaration. I had never made one before and would not have known where to start.

I turned toward him and found him looking down at me with a slightly puzzled expression, as though a rare butterfly had landed on his finger. A man past fifty, I told myself firmly, was certainly too old to blush.

‘Do you feel different?’ I asked.

‘I feel – right. Like my body isn’t fighting what it was meant to be anymore.’

That was how he looked. All the time that I had known him, it had seemed that he was fading away, and I had grieved to see it. But now it was clear that the process of change had not been a dissolution but a refinement, taking him further from me but closer to himself.

With my left hand, I touched his face where the cheek flared with its economic lines. ‘Can you feel that?’

‘Only the pressure.’

I lifted my palm away, not making it a caress; I didn’t want to remind him of Martel. But neither of us moved to separate; he was smiling at me a little, in the way that was mainly in his eyes, and I smiled helplessly back. He turned his hand over where it rested on his knee, slowly, and I lay mine over it, so that the rosary joined them together. It was like touching a statue except that he was indefinably alive; I could feel his slow steady heartbeat when I pressed my fingers to the inside of his wrist, and remembered the pollen shining there.

All the while I was talking about a book I had read on the voyage, some adventure tale about a man and his valet circumnavigating the world. It must have sounded like chatter, to him if to anyone. My own heart was racing, perhaps with the coffee and the altitude, perhaps with nerves.

It felt almost like a courtship – the careful touches, the jealous chaperones – though of course I had been won decades ago. I kept thinking of the marqayuk and the skeleton on the plinth: the unnecessary warning that was practically an invitation, like the fruit in the garden.

‘You have to know—’ Raphael said, when I had finally fallen silent in my confusion. He did not trail off like any person might have done, searching for words: he simply stopped, and let me read the meaning in the gap. ‘If we had had more time—’

But there had been no other time, between Clem’s departure and Martel’s arrival, when I had only begun to get the barest inkling of what he meant to me. If I had arrived in Peru a year or two earlier, if I had not been injured… I would have been so cocksure that I would scarcely have noticed him at all, in my eagerness to cross the salt line and get myself killed. Keita saw all potential futures: if there had been one that turned out better, for us and for Bedlam, I thought he cared for me enough that he would have arranged it. Like Pangloss, I had to believe that this was the best of all possible worlds.

‘I wish we had,’ I said. ‘But I am glad. All my life, I will be glad.’ And then I tilted my head and kissed him, lightly, but so he could tell that I had wanted to do it. I heard the guards tense behind us, yet there was no danger: he kept his hands still and open, and did not shift except to move his face very slightly toward mine.

Then it was over. And perhaps, after all, it was better so – better that we had never foundered on the shoals of my awkwardness and shame. But I remembered waking in the tent on that single morning with the weight of his arm across me, and in that moment I wanted so much that I could scarcely breathe.

We sat in silence together while the feeling washed over me and retreated, leaving only the same quiet happiness in its wake. Then, ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘let’s go down and look at the gardens,’ and offered me his open-palmed hand to help me rise.


End file.
